writing

All posts tagged writing

Well the words are pouring out at the moment with two new website proposals written, my lovely grandson’s dailyblog diary, my Pasta Paulie blog, and this slightly neglected website needing to be updated. I’ve put the ‘embarrassing moments’ e-book on hold for a while because an old friend (who’s a lovely writer with a nicely observed dry wit) and I are doing some outline scripts for a tv or radio-based sitcom. We might well be using some of the red-faced scenarios within the plot lines so I need to keep them fresh and under wraps for the moment. Wouldn’t it be fun to see the most amusing days of your life played out on the silver screen? Anyway a long way to go before that happens.
I’ve been doing some background thinking and observing. A typical US sitcom which airs over 30 mins only has 22 mins of programme with 8 mins of advertising breaks. UK sitcoms maybe last 24 minutes. A typical script would be 6500 words and run to around 35 pages depending on the amount of dialogue – some like Yes Minister are dialogue-heavy whilst the Royle Family relies on a lot of visual content. I watched an episode of Frasier closely yesterday morning and counted around 70 moments (be it a telling phrase, pay-off line, funny look, visual humour etc) that resulted in a laugh reaction from the audience. That’s a lot of humour packed into 22 minutes and it’s all beautifully-crafted around a single or sometimes two storylines. Such great writing. And that’s all my mate and I have to deliver. Yikes, better get back to the laptop if we’re going to create characters as memorable as these two…that’s me on the right by the way.

Like this:

An interesting feature in today’s i newspaper by Tom Foot suggests that teaching English has become redundant because of facilities like spell-checker, according to a leading academic. Ummm. Texting may be very popular with young people but it won’t be terribly helpful when it comes to producing a compelling CV I’d suggest. Anyway it’s an interesting point. Have a look at the article and see what you think…

Technology that “auto-corrects” spelling and grammar is widespread and means children are learning basic linguistic rules in their own unique way, the academic told the Times Education Supplement.

He said: “Should [students] learn how to write good sentences? Yes, of course they should. They should learn how to convey emotion and meaning through writing. But we have perhaps a mistaken notion that the way in which we write is the right way, and that the way in which young people write, through their SMS texting language, is not the right way.

Prof Mitra, who recently won a prestigious $1m education prize to develop a generation of “cloud schools” where children learn from each other online, added: “This emphasis on grammar and spelling, I find it a bit unnecessary because they are skills that were very essential maybe a hundred years ago but they are not right now.”

Well I can see that texting is an appealing short hand made even more popular by the rise in popularity of Twitter, a medium based on brevity of expression. I wrote about the amazing growth in text communications a while ago when I was reminiscing about using earlier forms of short hand. For those of you of a certain age this might stir some memories…

txting; dnt mke me lol…

I’m sure they must run classes to teach kids all these annoying short-hand codes for their texting. I guess the need to compress messages within the limit of 160 characters had a lot to do with it. I have to admit that I tend to use some text shorthand too but different from this gr8 stuff. More of that in a second. But here’s a little fact for you to show you what a man of foresight I really am. One of the guys who developed the SMS standard was a guy from Cellnet called Kevin Holley and back when I was Head of Marketing there, I was shown this new and additional way of communicating by mobile phone. Despite being a lot cheaper than a voice message I still found it unlikely to believe that anyone, other than our engineers, would choose to resort to typing a message when they could just simply call and speak to someone. Didn’t they know that mail was dead? Spanner-heads – pah! Within 15 years 4 trillion SMS messages were being sent each year. A multi-£billion business in its own right. Er oops…

Anyway back to my shorthand influences. When I was a lot younger and working for the international telecommunications part of the GPO, my job involved making daily contact with counterparts in telecoms departments overseas. It was all to do with contract terms on private international circuits being leased by major companies between their various international offices. This was way before the onset of office computers and the internet (although spookily in this role I was working on the leases for a US defence/research/education network called Arpanet which was eventually to transform into the internet, don’t you know) and so we resorted to a service called telex, a switched network of teleprinters for sending text based messages. This little doozy of a teleprinter was the 1970′s hi-tech equivalent of the iPhone5 smartphone and it took a trained operator to run it…

Oh you sexy thang.

The usage procedures were as archaic as the machine. The GPO was part of the civil service where employment rather than business efficiency was the prime imperative. If you wanted a letter typed it was necessary to draft something by hand (and neatly), specify the degree of urgency (and exaggerated claims resulted in you being disciplined), with drafts submitted within a brown re-usable envelope and plopped in to an office out-tray where an old guy would trundle up 2/3 times a day to collect the envelopes and deliver them via the post room to the typing pool. There a formidable and frustrated superintendant of the pool would assess your level of urgency and assign it to one of the girls in the pool. If you were lucky you’d get it back 3 or 4 days later. If you were extremely lucky it had no typos and could be sent out immediately but the girls knew that the odd mistake would need amending, thus protecting their jobs, and the whole process would start again. If you were brave you would risk going to see the superintendant to check out whether she’d sanction a quicker delivery of your typing work. This was in front of a baying pack of some 40-50 young all-female typists all eager to embarrass the pants of a coy junior manager. I think I learned all of my flirting skills with the supers in the typing pool. They were all 20+ years my senior but I got on with them all. My mum taught me the importance of good manners and it paid off in spades in the typing pool.

The situation with the telex messages was almost as bad. There was a specific telex form from a large green pad that had to be completed with a bewildering set of pro-forma details before you got to the message itself. The finished thing had to be left ina separate tray from the typing requests and the outbound internal message envelopes. It was still the same little old guy who collected them and they all went into the same collecting basket/trolley. I soon realised that it took very little to get old Albert to do a quick drop for you into the telex operators’ office but, Soprano-like, he needed to have his beak wetted to perform a service.

But there was still the message. Telex language protocols were based on older telegraphic procedures where text was charged by its length. So a universal 5 letter code system was developed to replace regular business language phrases with shorthand. So, for example, instead of saying ‘with reference to your message of ‘ you could use the term WALPU or WALOS for ‘re our message of ‘. There were loads of other codes like TUHRU (say if in agreement), TUNHO (we agree), TUNVU (you’re having a giraffe) and things like UPBAG (for ‘fyi’ – perhaps it would have been more efficient to use the latter) and MAHPO (why the hell was it not delivered? – one of my personal favourites).

The daily trick amongst the junior staff was to try and send a message using either full code or highly abbreviated text. So all our written messages even notes to each other became truncated eg TX for thanks, PLSE for please, CCTS for circuits, GRT NWS for oh I say that’s marvellous to hear. A finished message read like something written in Finnish interspersed with bits of Esperanto.

And this was cutting edge business comms. Seems like a million years ago now but lots of it has stuck with me and still finds its way onto my text messages these days.

But diverting as all this is, there will always be a need for a well-written piece of copy to secure that job interview, deliver a cracking speech or that critical presentation. And hopefully I may be able to help you with that.

Paul

Share this:

Like this:

This article by Oliver Wright featured in the ‘i’ newspaper on 24 July. In a nicely dry tone it describes a new online writing style guide aimed at outlawing Whitehall jargon. It highlights some lovely examples of departmental gobbledygook and makes a simple plea for clear and concise writing. Amen to that.

As the fictional permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby once said: “If you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other.”

But no more.

Britain’s cadre of real life civil servants have finally been banned from using the jargon that has kept the comedy writers from Yes Minister to the Thick Of It in gags for years.

Officials have been issued with an online style guide that tells them, for the first time, what unacceptable Whitehallese is.

Out goes ‘deliver’. Pizzas and post are delivered, it points out, not abstract concepts like ‘improvements’ or ‘priorities’.

Officials can no long ‘drive’ anything out (unless it is cattle) or ‘foster’ (unless it is children).

Tackling is also banned (unless Sir Humphrey or Terri Coverley are playing rugby or football) while the ‘key’ should always be in the lock.

Overall more than 30 terms of jargon that have crept into Government announcements and policy documents over the years have been placed off-limits.

There will be no more advancing, collaborating, combating or pledging.

People will no longer be empowered. Government will no longer facilitate while even ministers will not be focusing on areas of policy.

The style guide has been created by the team who put together the Government’s new website Gov.uk – which aims to bring together every Government service in a single format that is easy to navigate and use.

In the forward to the style guide the authors point out that this aim will be negated if everything published if full of official gobbledy gook.

“We lose trust from our users if we write government ‘buzzwords’ and jargon,” they point out.

“Often, these words are too general and vague and can lead to misinterpretation or empty, meaningless text. We can do without these words.”

Sarah Richards, who worked on the guide, said plain English was not the same a dumbing down.

“The style is about writing clearly, concisely and without jargon. Everyone can benefit from simplicity,” she wrote on a blog launching the site.

“Some people have previously seen this as ‘dumbing down’ but being open and accessible to everyone isn’t ‘dumb’ – it’s our responsibility.”

But a quick glance at recent Government press notices suggest that some officials still have something to learn.

Take this recent ‘news story’ from the Cabinet Office – the department that is also responsible for Gov.uk.

“The government is establishing a Global Learning Exchange on impact investment. Impact investment provides capital to deliver both social and financial results.

“This multi-stakeholder exchange will focus on sharing best practice on ‘what works’ in impact investing. It will provide a shared platform to debate and create ideas as well as inviting new voices to the field.

“Social impact investment has a critical role to play in helping entrepreneurs around the world to identify sustainable solutions to the most challenging social issues. The G8 Social Impact Investment Forum represents an exciting point in the development of the field – bringing together, for the first time, government, industry and civil society leaders to identify ways to catalyse the global market.”

It makes Sir Humphrey sound erudite.

But Steve Jenner from Plain English Campaign said any attempt to improve things was very welcome.

“For many years government has been presented to the public in finest government departmental gobbledygook,” he said.

“The fact that much of this is unintentionally hilarious suggests how bad things had become.

“Plain English Campaign applauds this attempt to encourage clarity, though, and would be happy to assist any government department in this.”

Tongue firmly in cheek a Cabinet Office Spokeswoman said: “Going forward, we will be advancing a pledge to deliver and utilise clearer language on our award-winning GOV.UK.

“We are keen to foster improved cooperation to empower further the public and are delighted that the Independent has recognised this drive to deploy and leverage a streamlined vocabulary.

“But seriously, we want to get better at this, and the Content Guide is one of the reasons GOV.UK has over 1.3m users a month.”

What’s out

* Slimming down (processes don’t diet)

* Foster (unless it is children)

* Agenda (unless it is for a meeting)

* Commit/pledge (we’re either doing something or we’re not)

* Deliver (pizzas, post and services are delivered – not abstract concepts like ‘improvements’ or ‘priorities’)

Share this:

Like this:

In an interview with the i’s Jonathan Brown on 18 July comic Stewart Lee claims that many of today’s most successful stand-up acts like Malcolm McIntyre and Jake Whitehall employ writers to provide them with new material. OMG imagine that; busy guys who have to rely on some outside help to keep their work content fresh. Oh the artistic shame! Do lighten up Stewart. Anyway here’s the article for you to make up your own minds about creative integrity….

Some of Britain’s most high-profile comics use behind-the-scenes writers to furnish them with material, marking a break with the traditions established by alternative comics in the 1980s, stand-up Stewart Lee has claimed.

Andi Osho, Michael McIntrye, Jack Whitehall and Frankie Boyle are among the artists named by Lee in an address to English students at his former Oxford University college. “They all use writers. They don’t often admit to it,” he said.

“Sometimes there are these strange credits you’ll see, something called programme associate – blah blah – which is television language for ‘there is a writer but we are going to give him this name because we want to preserve the idea that the comedian is … hermetically sealed – that you are getting this person’s individual vision,” he said.

McIntyre has previously denied industry rumours that he uses joke writers saying: “I never get a laugh with somebody else’s jokes. I can’t do it justice.”

It was the latest sideswipe by Lee against McIntyre, who grossed £21m on his last stadium tour. On stage, Lee has previously compared McIntyre’s observational routine to “spoon-feeding his audience warm diarrhoea”.

No one was available to respond to the claim at McIntyre’s agents, whilst agents for Osho, Whitehall and Boyle all declined to comment.

During a scholarly 50-minute lecture originally delivered at a writers’ event at St Edmund Hall in February, Lee jokingly called for comics who secretly rely on writers to be “stripped” of their artistic and financial rewards like “disgraced, drug-taking Tour de France cyclists”.

Contrasting the long-form solo shows in publicly subsidised art centres in the 1980s with the modern comedy world dominated by TV and the internet, he said: ‘I already feel like a relic in what I do.

“I think the idea of a stand-up as a writer, as a sort of auteur, is already on the way out … the lucrative opportunities to fill hours and hours of television with stand-up comedy in little bite-size bits have pushed the writer-auteur-comedian model aside.”

Bruce Dessau, founder of the comedy website beyondthejoke.co.uk, said many modern comics did not have time to write all their own jokes. “If you are on tour or TV all the time how do you find the material?” he said.

Comedian Neil Dougan said many writers were happy to provide material for other, better-known stars. “I have written for TV comics. I am always glad of the money. And if larger audiences than I can dream of pulling in enjoy the gags, I do derive satisfaction. People can always just nick your stuff if they want it,” he said.

Well there you have it. You might charge me with the Mandy Rice-Davies defence of ‘well he would say that wouldn’t he’ but isn’t that what writers are for; to provide the words that you need? I should use that line…!

After a busy sort of day I’ve had a couple of hours just to myself this afternoon, and I’ve done nothing other than sit here and just think about, well, unimportant things – blissful. Regular readers will recognise this tendency of mine to muse on life’s big issues and today I’ve been giving thought to the Co-op and more specifically to their strap-line ‘Good with food’.

It’s one of those snappy little brand phrases which is almost perfect. It sums up the essence of the supermarket and looks great written down because of the repetition of ‘ood’. It’s tempting to say ‘nice assonance’ but the English language is nothing if not contrary and wouldn’t you know it, the words good and food are pronounced slightly differently. Perfidious Albion eh. It’s the most powerful language on earth but it must drive new learners to absolute distraction. But that’s why I find it so utterly intriguing. To be truly perfect, food would need to be pronounced as fud but of course it isn’t. So the canny Co-op have employed the fine Scottish actor John Hannah, who has a distinctive South Lanarkshire accent, to do the voice-over in their adverts. So that when you hear the line it sounds like ‘Guid with Fuid’.

Hats off; they nearly pull it off. But I still see one thing and yet I want to hear ‘good with fud’ which just makes me smile. Don’t you love it when things are almost brilliant but just ever so slightly imperfect? As John Hannah might say ‘wuids are guid’.

Paul

Share this:

Like this:

This is an article written by Nick Harding in today’s i newspaper about the work of Stephanie Davies, a former stand-up comic who now advises CEOs and workteams on the importance of humour in their communications.

Have you heard the one about the CEO and the comedian? No? Well, bosses and humour don’t always mix. Their attempts to use laughter as a motivational tool, or to garner popularity, often fall somewhere between excruciating embarrassment and out-and-out inappropriateness. “Big” Nev Wilshire from BBC’s fly-on-the-wall documentary The Call Centre is a case in point.

But when harnessed properly, humour and laughter can be powerful tools in and out of the boardroom. And that’s where Stephanie Davies comes in. As a former stand-up comic, she is now a behavioural expert and founder of Laughology, a unique enterprise that uses the science of laughter and humour to develop psychology-based programmes that help people in a range of settings, several of which are the boardrooms of blue-chip companies.

Davies works with CEOs, executive teams and workforces in areas such as culture change, creating happy workplaces, staff engagement, communication and presentation skills, and executive coaching. Outside of the boardroom, she has applied her skills to a variety of groundbreaking projects. These include creating the country’s first happy-centred school, developing an initiative to encourage resilience and community spirit in a divided area of Bradford and running a rehabilitation programme for service users in a secure mental-health unit.

When it comes to teaching CEOs to be engaging, Davies’ work is serious. “Language and the way we use it has a huge bearing on how we are perceived,” she says. “Some executives use lingo, acronyms and corporate bullshit, which are all inaccessible to normal people. One of the most important aspects of leadership is connecting with people and to achieve this you need to reframe the language you use. It is archaic to be talking to people in old-style leadership speak. Look at Barack Obama, he’ll often use humour and the common touch to get a message across.”

To get business leaders to let go of their reliance on corporate speak, Davies draws on her days as a stand-up. “I get them to stand up and tell a funny story about something that happened to them, in front of their peers. Many squirm at first. But suddenly their whole method of communication changes, they become upbeat, open and, most importantly they start to use simplistic, accessible language. It’s a powerful way of getting people to realise how to deliver a message in a more human way. It’s not about turning people into David Brent, it’s about turning them into Barack Obama.”

After this the article gets a little serious and quasi-scientific but you can check it out yourself or look up her book, ‘Laughology: improve your life with the science of laughter’. But forgetting all the well-being mumbo-jumbo I think the point she makes is valid. I’ve often found that the careful use of humour, particularly self-deprecating, can be a powerful way to create a responsive atmosphere and to disarm potentially difficult audiences. At the same time it’s not the only weapon in your communications armoury; a passionately-delivered, compellingly believable statement can be utterly inspirational. Think of Martin Luther KIng’s ‘I Have a Dream’ address or Shakespeare’s Henry V speech to his troop’s before Agincourt, Churchull’s classic ‘On the Beaches’ and ‘The Few’ wartime broadcasts, and more recently the eulogy to Diana delivered by her brother and you’ll know what I mean. Laughter’s good in its place but conviction and eloquence are mightier.

Paul

Share this:

Like this:

I thought it would be useful for anyone considering my services from a personal point of view to give an example of a eulogy I wrote recently. This one’s very meaningful to me as it was for my mum who passed away a few months ago. There’s a bit of preamble to set the scene and I’ve omitted some family tribute stuff to keep it tighter as an example of my work.

Wednesday dawned and it was a lousy day for a funeral and burial; cold, sleeting with a biting wind. The 13th. Sigh. We’d wanted the next day but the church was booked solid with weddings. Valentine’s day. Ah well. The family loaded into the funeral cars and we set off for that dreaded drive to the church. Will anyone be there you wonder. The windows were steamed and I rubbed mine clear and saw a postman stand to attention and bow respectfully as the cortege passed. What a lovely gesture – it made me feel a bit better as I gathered my thoughts before delivering the eulogy for our beloved mum. I was determined to do her memory credit.

We arrived at the church and helped my father and sister into the church. My brothers, nephews and I were pall bearers. I’ve never performed that task before and I found it very emotional to be honest especially as we entered to ‘Loving You’ by her favourite singer Elvis. I already had lump in my throat. The service was very moving with her favourite hymns ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘Jerusalem’ and a fitting playing of ‘Bewitched’ by Bill Snyder to allow private thoughts about Helen.

What followed was very difficult. I had a lot of trouble delivering the speech and the congregation, a storming full house in the church, felt embarrassed for me. I delivered it, eventually, but it wasn’t terribly dignified. I did a lot of name-checking because I think that’s what people want to hear at these occasions; to know they meant something to the person concerned. You’ll appreciate that other than my mum and dad’s, I’ve shortened the names to initials just to protect the guilty.

Anyway here are the words, delivered, as they should have been, without hesitation, repetition or tears…

On behalf of my family I’d like to share some words about Mum – a life lived with dignity

Born Eleanor Smith on 19 Aug 1931

Elder sister to E, B and brother T.

It was a difficult childhood. Her father H was crippled physically and emotionally by losing his leg (and his unit) in the killing fields of WW1. He returned not to a land fit for heroes but to an ignominious welcome – no work, no prospects, no social welfare, no hope. Bitter and increasingly irrational he took his frustrations out on his kids with a stern rule in the home. No-one was spared the belt least of all Mum being the eldest.

Educated at Devonshire Park school and very briefly at Hodgson’s, Helen (she hated the name Eleanor) left school at 14 to start work and help support the family. She worked for a time at Masons hardware store (which is where I’m sure she developed her lifelong dislike for kitchenware) and then at Timpson’s shoe shop on Church St which she loved of course (and which no doubt inspired her lifelong passion for great shoes).

But life continued to be harsh so who can forgive the girl for taking the first opportunity to escape to Manchester to forge a life independent of her father’s influence? Working at Lewis’ store she met a handsome local lad called Bob who introduced his best friend B to sister E. Not too long later a double wedding day followed. I came along in 1952.

Times were tough I suspect – their first tiny flat was in Moss Side and as an area it was about as attractive then as it is now. Mum’s strong personality started to assert itself; her first ultimatum to Bob followed and shortly afterwards the fledgling family Leonard moved back to Blackpool to live with her mum N. Bob took a job at Mothers Pride bakery and quickly established himself as King of the salesmen at a time when bread was served at every setting at every table in every hotel and guest house in Blackpool serving some 10m people a year.

With a lot of hard work and I think a slightly swollen income statement from a very grateful bakery Sales Manager Helen and Bob secured a mortgage on their first home and moved to Belgrave Place in leafy Poulton-le-Fylde. Via moves to Oldfield Close and latterly to Levens Drive they have remained in the town to this day, making lifelong friendships along the way from J and K to F and M. The family itself grew to include sons D and M and longed-for daughter H who finally completed the family after Mum and Dad lost baby A at a very young age 11 years earlier.

Now settled, Mum came in to her own. She could have slotted into the regime of a nappy-washing housewife but that was never going to satisfy her was it? She blossomed and pushed herself and Bob to always think bigger and we her children to always aspire to achieve. She was quite a woman. On Sundays although money was tight we went out for lunch at a pretty cool restaurant so that we always knew how to feel comfortable and act in a restaurant (with the exception of D who took some hefty discipline when he failed the behaviour test, every week). To this day we‘ve always enjoyed eating out. It was all about instilling confidence and giving their kids things they never had as children. How proud they were of that and in their kids and grandkids doing well at school. To waste an education was unforgivable in their eyes and you can understand why when you realised what they had to forego.

In the home Helen was delightfully different. She rarely cooked – Bob far outshone her in this task from fairly early on. But she could cook 3 dishes brilliantly – mashed potatoes, corn beef hash and rice pudding. Absolutely everything else was down to Bob. She was immensely house-proud and rather stylish (which meant rather expensive) in her tastes as I remember Dad learning painfully when stuff would arrive from the most exclusive furnishing shops in town. This wasn’t an occasional situation; Helen would become firm long-life friends with her suppliers like Mr W. And this applied equally well even if the expert was an old boyfriend like D, the decorator. Neither Bob nor Helen were much good with a paint brush; in fact I can honestly say I’ve never seen my Dad with a paint brush in his hand in 60 years. But they were both very comfortable knowing what they were good at and what they should leave to others. They never pretended to be anything other than true to themselves.

In other ways Helen was a classic; as well as being stylish in her home tastes she had incredible dress sense. Always a very attractive woman, she’d shop at the most exclusive store in town and on the night of a works dinner and dance I’d remember her coming downstairs looking like Gina Lollobrigida and Dad looking on admiringly with that slightly concerned look on his face which screamed out ‘how many loaves of bread will I have to sell to pay for that?’ But he never ever complained (at least not in front of us).

Helen had her flaws too of course. I used to have boss of whom it was said that he was a man of firm views, weakly held. Well Mum was a woman of strong opinions, passionately held. I used to tend to side with my Dad’s mildly socialist principles at family discussions over the dinner table. Mum was always willing to chide the iron lady Mrs Thatcher for being a bit too soft on subjects such as Europe, the unions, the miners, poll-tax , the Falklands etc. Backed up by her brother T on issues such as state welfare they’d form an indomitable and impenetrable barrier to logical argument and sensible persuasion. Or as we call such people today, UKIP members.

Another slight blindspot in more ways than one was her driving ability. Normally pretty safe, Helen could be distracted by the odd bit of naughty behaviour from we kids. One day driving us to school in the family’s brand new Ford Anglia, and a little flustered by running late, Helen rounded on somebody’s horse-play in the back seat (I suspect a blond-haired brother) and completely lost control of the steering wheel and ploughed through the newly-constructed front wall and gates of the nicest looking house in our ‘circle’ of neighbours’ houses. Fortunately our neighbours didn’t complain one bit; not least because it was our house wall that Mum demolished. I’ll never forget her calling the Ford garage and imploring them to collect, repair and return the car by 4pm before Dad got home. Then haranguing them for being unresponsive and uncaring when they politely answered that such a deadline might be beyond even their powers of restoration.

There are lots of little things that make me smile when I remember Helen’s loves and likes and quirky habits. She was a hugely keen gardener and her roses and begonia-laden borders were always a riot of colour and fragrances. Equally who can ever forget her sporting her bikini and wellies as she happily creosoted the garden fence in summer? Certainly not neighbour F I suspect. Then there was her love of the works of the Bronte’s and the many trips to Howarth. I particularly loved to see her enjoying a great party and doing the twist and we used to get a buzz out of asking her to read the tarot cards to find out what the future held for us especially as she was always so generous with the readings. Two things that I’ll always associate with mum were her little savings boxes from the old Martin’s bank which she religiously used to collect half-crowns, shillings and sixpences then 50p,20p and 10p’s, mostly liberated from poor Bob’s pockets; the other was her love of Carmen Jones as she played ‘Beat out that rhythm on a drum’ at full blast whilst hoovering and dusting.

It’s up to Bob to say what kind of a wife Helen was of course but we always saw them as a truly devoted couple, chalk and cheese yes but entirely complementary and totally in synch and so much in love. When mum’s illnesses began to grab hold, Bob instantly opted to become her primary and devoted carer. It became a full-time demanding role but a task he undertook without a moment’s doubt nor hesitation and a task he has undertaken with massive patience, devotion and selfless fortitude. Mum hasn’t just suffered only recently. She’s had to fight back from two major heart attacks and several smaller ones, cancer in her bowel, a massive stomach hernia, lungs ravaged by years of smoking, cholesterol levels stoked by drinking tea with the top of the milk, severe water retention in her legs and in recent years two major strokes which left her half-paralysed and bed-ridden. Apart from that she was a picture of health. I can be irreverent about this but truth be told she must have been made of carbon fused with solid oak and stainless steel to survive each of those conditions. A ‘tough old bird’ as Grandaughter R called her. How she survived into her 80’s is a miracle but perhaps it was just her way of saying she wasn’t going to leave her beloved Bob a lonely man.

Though in recent times we increasingly got used to Mum complaining from her sick-bed about everyone’s lack of attention (who can ever forget her bell ringing and jangling of the metal bed frame with her wooden spoon to signal that she needed something, anything) I never heard her complain much about her condition and situation until the last few months or so – I guess when she became frustrated by her inability to get about unaided, and to do the simplest tasks like going to the loo without help. For a proud woman it must have been intolerable; for my dad, brothers and sister who dealt with her condition it was exhausting. I must pay tribute to M and young M for putting in the big shifts supporting Dad, D as ever got all the practical stuff sorted and H remained a confidante and female rock for mum.

Living so far away gave me relief from that direct responsibility but not from the feeling of inner sorrow from not being on hand to help out more. It’s something I have to live with but I took succour in recent months from sending her letters which I know she enjoyed having read to her and I was relieved beyond words to know that Dad read her my last letter before she left us. I understand that she’d scribbled some words in reply but they were the usual indecipherable scratchings that she’d been producing in the last few months.

Fortunately I’d been gathering letters and cards and things bearing her readable thoughts and wishes in the last year or so as a personal tribute to her memory. Handwriting is such a distinctively unique mark and I can look on these whenever I need to now and always remember Mum for what she was. A beautiful, smart, sassy lady with a personality as big as her love of life. She was a deep and true friend but men especially I think were attracted to her. Once she cast a spell guys, rich or poor/gay or straight/little or large/young or old were all smitten. The only man who didn’t succumb was her idol Elvis Presley but then he never made it to Poulton-le-Fylde.

But Helen was first and foremost a proud wife and mum, strong and devoted elder sister for E, B and T and sister-in-law to L, J and By; mum-in-law to C and D, auntie to J and K, N, C, K and C and her brothers and sisters – an old-fashioned family matriarch as beloved in the role as was her own mum N, who I know she idolised (as did we). Appropriately she also followed her mum in being an adored grandma/nan/great grandma to R, E, S, R, M, M, S, S and G and I know she took such incredible delight in all her grandchildrens’ affection, care, personal development and achievements.

It was difficult to watch her slowly fade. My cousin K reminded me that the best piece of advice mum gave to her sister B was ‘to never live to see 80’. Well she did somehow, and no matter how poorly she became my proudest recollection is that Helen was a woman of such incredible strength and dignity and she can never be replaced or removed from our collective memory. Goodbye Mum. Be at peace now. Go show Elvis what he missed out on.

LYM

We left the church, again bearing her coffin, to the overture to Carmen. So perfect.

The burial took place, with just close family attending, in just about the worst weather I’ve experienced this winter. But it didn’t really matter. Fighting a gale, my brother M said some lovely words linking my mum with my sister who died almost 60 years ago on almost the same day and whose unmarked grave was only feet from my mum’s. We’d found its exact location just the day before. Now they were re-united. The freezing cold, biting wind, sleet, snow and driving rain just couldn’t diminish the poignancy of that moment for us. I think it was the good-bye she would have wished for.